Highlights

sunn 0))) / Eagle TwinAS220; Providence, RI

sunn 0))) and Eagle Twin packed AS220, the legendary Providence community center and art space. (Well, sunn 0))) drew the crowd, but Eagle Twin proved themselves good enough to headline a future tour.) I arrived at 8:30, half an hour after tickets went on sale and half an hour before the doors opened, and the line stretched maybe 200, 300 yards down the sidewalk. It was a long queue, but as far I know, everyone who showed up eventually got in. Those who forgot earplugs or didn’t bring them out of ignorance of the nature of the show asked to borrow from friends or neighbors; as soon as Eagle Twin plugged in and turned on, ears were plugged. For the first time in my concert-going experience, the volume wasn’t somewhere in between too-loud-for-unprotected-listening and too-quiet-for-plugs. No, the volume was somewhere in the sonic range of jet engines.

Eagle Twin played a brand of metal, rock taken to its logical conclusions, its absolute extremes. The singing was roaring; the lyrics were beyond epic and perhaps also beyond silly (one of the songs seemed to be a kind of creation myth: “Granite begat stone and violence / stone begat drum / wood begat songs” or something – there was a lot of alchemical, improbable begetting); the drumsticks were wielded like cudgels; the guitar actually deserved to be compared to an axe. It kicked ass, which is what rock music has always striven to do at its best, higher aspirations be damned. And its ass kicking was in some way manifest in the relationship between band and audience; the loudness of the sound, the aggression of the music, and the length of the performance (Eagle Twin played for 50 minutes and sunn 0))) for an eternity, I think) all suggested a fundamental antagonism. This would be more evident when sunn 0))) took the stage.

What I realized early in the night was that this music was gravitational (hence the names Earth and sunn 0))), perhaps). It took the once-in-a-lifetime decibel level of sunn 0))) for this thought to crystallize. I felt like a human divining rod. My clothes vibrated against my skin, the floorboards vibrated under my feet. When I sat against the wall, the wall conducted vibrations into my back. The entire space was in perpetual motion. sunn 0)))’s music transcended the category of music; it was a dramatic demonstration of the physical nature of sound. The wave property of the material world was constantly and thunderously evident.

Besides the initially rapturous feeling of being played like a tuning fork, I felt as though the immense force issuing from the wall of cabs on stage was trying to subsume me. And just when I thought the last chord had been struck -- the vocalist had left the stage a couple of minutes earlier -- he returned in a frightening costume: a towering, mummified corpse with a grotesque mask and an unwieldy arm resembling a gnarled, infected tree trunk. He screamed in an inhuman way, and a couple of people retreated to the bar area, apparently to recover.

sunn 0))) did some very cool things with a trombone, along with throat singing and whispering that was uncanny in its imitation of reversed vocals. Eagle Twin flaunted a jaw-dropping technique, modulating guitar feedback using an acoustic guitar and bass feedback using an electric guitar. None of that, however, is sure to remain with me. What I will remember is the feeling that the speaker cones might push enough air to make the building vibrate at its resonant frequency, might make the entire city block shudder and crack, collapsing on top of me in an ecstatic moment of relief, the sound finally succeeding in destroying itself.